


The Webs We Weave

by TheSweetestTart



Series: Sunglasses, Sneakers, and Sniper Rifles [1]
Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 4
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Eventual Fluff, Eventual Smut, F/M, Fix-It, Grief/Mourning, Maybe? Find out next time on Dragon Ball Z, Mild Language, Not Canon Compliant, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-01-24
Updated: 2017-01-29
Packaged: 2018-09-19 16:03:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 5,010
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9449354
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheSweetestTart/pseuds/TheSweetestTart
Summary: The Widow of the Wasteland is a walking mystery. It's Deacon's job to know things. Mysteries and knowing things aren't exactly conducive to one another.





	1. prologue

90% of being an informant is the work of being actively informed. And it wasn’t as though Deacon was some sort of head honcho with a bunch of _other_ informants all informing him. What this boiled down to was that Deacon did a lot of walking and a lot of eavesdropping and he owned way more clothes than most human beings had any right to own.

It seemed that big losses were a universal experience lately. The Railroad at the Switchboard, the Minutemen in Quincy. If he were more prone to buying into such things, he might’ve wondered if karma was finally looping back around to remind the decent(ish) sections of humanity that they still killed the world after letting them catch their breath. But that kind of grand-scale speculation tended to be pretty moot when your job was to catch the devil in the details. Today’s identity was ‘grungy trader who’s pack brahmin had a tragic accident on a single stair’-- not to be confused with his many other disguises such as ‘grungy caravaneer’ and ‘grungy settler’. What could he say? Wastelanders loved grunge. Though the northern bits of the Commonwealth, away from the husk of Boston, seemed...oddly cleaner. Like the air smelled only slightly fresher than the usual acrid sting of radiation that hung so heavily. Sure didn’t take the chill out of the autumnal night or stop his nose running as a consequence, though.

Deacon leaned against the back of one of the once bright blue dilapidated homes of Sanctuary Hills, hidden from both the cold moonlight and flickering firelight by the sad tilt of the structure’s walls sagging. Skulking like this came as naturally as breathing to the agent. What he’d managed to gather was that they were the only ones to make it out of the Quincy massacre, a single Minuteman, two women, two men, and a Mr. Handy obsessively tending some withered geraniums. Though he hadn’t expected them here-- he’d expected them in Concord. Yet here they were, little the worse for wear aside the exhaustion and dead-eyed-depression he’d expected of them.

He wiped his nose, pursing his lips. There was a missing variable in all of this. The gear of change ticking a stagnant Commonwealth into some... _different_ motions than the usual machine tended to go.

The Sole Survivor of Vault 111.


	2. rude awakening

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> she's really more akin to a frozen corpse than a woman.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> reversed the sole's career backgrounds for fun! now f!sole (my own artemis) is a military woman and m!sole was a lawyer. thought it'd be interesting.
> 
> do forgive how much her name makes hr sound like a YA dystopian novel protag. i chose artemis because codsworth would say it out loud and grey because it was a single syllable that flowed well with it LOL
> 
> ty once again to kristicola for beta reading it wahaha hopefully soon we'll get somewhere

Artemis Grey wished she was dead. Or perhaps she was, and she’d gone to a very particular frozen sort of hell. She couldn’t stop herself from hitting the floor with a harsh metal clang as the door to her cryopod finally lifted free. The woman choked in a breath that screamed into her atrophied lungs like an inferno, her shivering fingers clenched into a fist, brought down against the ground in an expression of sheer fury and pain. She was too numb to feel it, though the pragmatic side of her chided that it would certainly hurt later. But only the present existed to her currently, the overwhelming rush of sensation of her consciousness returning to her. Waking up somewhere foreign in a great amount of pain was something someone of her background had contingencies for. Whether that place was a foreign prison, or a foreign bed with a foreign person in unfamiliar safety. 

She had far more experience with the latter.

She had to ground herself. She had to be _somewhere_. The ground was cold and unremarkable. Concrete. The air was tepid and thin. Underground. The Vault. She pushed herself up onto her knees, hands fumbling blindly around her face as if to check if it were still there. It was, of course. Her hair, although brittle and awkwardly matted to her head, was still there as well. Her long, skinny form, more angles than curves, sat as awkwardly in the bright blue Vault suit as it ever did. Her body was there. She was whole.

She was _alive_.

Artemis groped through the air for something to grab onto for leverage and found the control panel of her husband’s cryopod to be suitable enough. The soles of her feet finally found the ground proper, and though her knees creaked and groaned in protest of the movement, she stood up, leaning heavily against the cryopod before her.

Nate was dead. She knew this to be true. Her cheek pressed against the icy glass separating them, hazy amber gaze lingering in nothingness. She watched him get shot. She knew he was dead. It wasn’t as though looking at him now would be shocking. Yet her heart twisted and rebelled against her.

It was pointless, she decided. Finally, she drew away from the pod to turn her gaze to the window inside. Her stomach turned, and for a moment unto eternity, it felt like all senses had abandoned her. Gravity, warmth, reality, all slipped away. The rhythmic pulses of pain in her hand drew her back to earth, and she glanced down to see bruises already blossoming down the side of her hand and wrist where she’d hit it so hard. She exhaled a quiet breath, setting the injured hand back down onto the control panel. Her forefinger traces the flickering red release button, considering.

She pressed it, stepping back and away as the cryopod opened with a hiss of pressure release. She would make this quick. She had to make this quick. Artemis held her breath as she stepped forward to take Nate’s right hand, struggling to pry his golden wedding band free of his frozen knuckles. With a sickening crack, it finally loosened and slid free, and she wastes no time in taking a number of too-quick steps away from the pod, band clutched in hand. It was all too much. She wavered, legs awkwardly bowing out as she half-fell half-sat onto the stairs.

How long had it been? It felt like it’d been only an hour or two since she watched her picturesque little suburban life go up in the blinding white light of the bomb. What had she even been thinking about before that? Halloween preparations? The lovely orange of the tree leaves? Was there anything left up there? If she left the Vault, would anything await her? No, of course there was _something_ out there. There had to be. People came in. And they went out. And they left with Shaun. She blinked, a mechanical little motion of relative necessity.

Yes, Shaun was all that was left. There was always...a disconnect between herself and him, perhaps she would have never made a good mother. But she could save his life. That she could do. Artemis looked down to Nate’s wedding band, a simple gold thing. She turned it over between her thumb and forefinger just so, the light reflecting off it and lighting up the inscription on its’ inner side.

_Till death._

She had never imagined it would be so grimly fitting. That death would part them, as it had to her once before him. And as it had done again. She closed her fingers around the band, standing up. Inaction hardly suited her-- it gave her too much time to fidget and think. No, she had a job to do, and the unfortunate skillset she knew she’d need to do it. She could only hope her home still stood, that anything remained that she might salvage.

Artemis stood up, inhaling a deep breath, holding it, and then letting it go quietly. And then she turned, leaving the cold concrete halls and metallic coffins behind her. The gears in her brain turned. She needed to be armed. She needed to see what others were like out here, to blend in. She needed to pick up Shaun’s trail. A frustratingly general checklist, but it would suffice. It was a direction, and that’s all she needed.

It was a quiet trek through the abandoned Vault. Perhaps in some distant part of her mind, she’d thought to see the Vault-Tec employees alive, still maintaining their cruel little facility. But there was nothing but bones and mouldering clothes, and a few terminals that spoke to a surprisingly quick collapse. She lifted a pip-boy from the corpse of a man in a lab-coat, and made her escape.  
Artemis Grey was left in the Vault. The woman who left was not the failed attempt at a mother, a homemaker faking a perfect life in suburbia. The woman who left the Vault was the soldier, the sniper whose trigger finger worked much more quickly than her tongue or heart.


	3. quiet

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the soul survivor decides a new name for a new time

If she was being honest, she felt the most like herself that she’d felt in a long time. She’s not sure it’s a good thing, entirely. But one never truly grows past four deployments in so short a time. One doesn’t grow past a kill count that high. The memories of hundreds of indistinct faces seen between the crosshairs. She tried not to think about it, and not thinking about it turned out to be quite easy. Perhaps the singular silver lining of the world she’d awoken to was that everyone was just as, if not more willing to shoot first.

Preston was a kind man. Kinder than Widow had expected of a militiaman, but not everyone took to such deep-seated grimness as she did. He killed for hope. Most other people in the Commonwealth killed just because, from what she understood. She sequestered herself to the edge of the misshapen ring of survivor’s they’d formed around their campfire, lingering just enough in the shadows that she felt...more comfortable, but not far enough away that the warmth of the fire was entirely lost. Preston, after having made sure of the others’ well-beings, picked up and moved to sit next to her. A comfortable distance away, of course, but enough so that they might speak quietly.

He pressed his lips together somewhat unsurely as she raised her head to look over at him, and he returned the gaze in kind. The silence lingered a very long few moments.

“In all the chaos, I didn’t get a chance to catch your name.” He began, offering a small smile that crinkled the skin around his warm eyes.

She picked at the straps of her worn old black combat trenchcoat- meant as camouflage for long nights laid out in a sniper perch. It was warm, at least, if not flattering or an advertisement of affable nature. Her name. She yanked at one of the straps a little too harshly, its' metal holdings giving a harsh snap, loud enough to be heard. What was her name? The one she should give out?

* * *

"Yuliya Lilia Alionushka." The words fumble off his American tongue as though his cheeks were filled with cotton, "That's a bit of a mouthful, huh?"

His smile is radiant and completely honest, a trait often found in Americans and not in the grim ranks of the Red Army to whom she owes herself to. His expression drooped a bit, and she realized she'd been staring at him-- and he'd probably taken it as glaring, for the severity of her features. The sniper blinked, giving her head a small shake and tugging her thin lips up into a smile. "It is, a mouthful, I mean. But my mother always said that such noble names are never a burden."

His smile jumped right back up onto his face, as though he'd never been worried at all, "That so? Oh-- I'm Nathan, by the way. Nate for short." He extends a hand, "It's not noble, but it is quick to say and easy to fit on a business card."

She delayed a second longer than necessary as per the usual in raising her hand to shake his-- long hours staring down a scope hadn't done wonders for her social abilities. You could dress a gunner up in a fancy dress and put a cocktail in her hand, but you couldn't make her a socialite, after all. His hand was soft, and warm and a good deal larger than her own. "Good to meet you, Nate."

"So then, Miss Alionushka." He enunciated each syllable of her foreign name intently, "Would you do me the honor of a dance?"

* * *

 

“Widow.” She answered quietly, bluntly, nudging her wedding band between her thumb and forefinger through the cloth of her gloves. The minuteman looked somewhat taken aback, shifting in his seat. He opened his mouth as if to give a gentle protest or reassurance, but the way her dull amber eyes fail to reflect the firelight as she looks up to him seem to be explanation enough.

“Widow, then. Thanks for everything back in Concord. You really pulled us out of the fire back there.” He adjusted his hat, leaning forward to rest his elbows on his knees. Widow hummed a quiet acknowledgement, fingers still picking at the straps. The silence lingered again until the sniper broke it.

“Diamond City was where you had said, correct?” Her narrow eyes crinkled as she thought it over-- a city, there was only one near enough to warrant speaking of, “Boston?”

“Yeah. There’s guards posted outside it-- you’ll know when you get there.”

Widow stood up, slinging her rifle over her back. Boston. She remembered she was supposed to go and give a speech in Boston. Her lips pull crookedly into an acknowledgement of that kind of irony. She figured she must be a little late for it by now.  
“You can’t seriously be considering leaving tonight?” Preston protested, concerned.

“I can’t stay here.” She croaked out-- far less firmly than she would've preferred, turning her gaze down to him. There was almost a plea in her eyes. He held his attempt at a glare for a few seconds before it softened in understanding.

“I get you. At least take Dogmeat with you-- he’ll howl all night if you don’t.” He offered a smile, “Go find your son. Just try to swing back up around when you get the chance, Widow.”

Widow nodded her head once, lips pressing into the only sort of smile the woman seemed able to manage. She then turned her head, clicking her tongue in the direction of her loyal canine companion. He gave an appreciative bark in return, taking to trailing after her as she made her way towards the bridge out of Sanctuary, disappearing into the shadows that licked at the edges of the firelight.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> maybe one day i won't post a chapter at ass in the morning


	4. following footsteps

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> deacon walks through the mausoleum of a life destroyed in a single flare

She calls herself the Widow. Deacon laughs a little bit about it, being that it’s just about the edgiest thing he’s heard in some time. And that’s saying something, considering how much time he’s spent loitering about Goodneighbour listening to common thugs assert their badass-ness.Yet somehow, she seems to wear the title with a significant amount of... _ dramatic chutzpah _ . When he hears that she’s moved on towards Diamond City, he makes a point to do the reverse, slipping his way back into Sanctuary. He didn’t exactly fancy a face-to-face just yet.

And thankfully, she took the dog with her. Dogs always made life hard. Their noses didn’t care nearly enough about his stealth tech for his liking. He made his way through each of the structurally-intact houses, nosing about for anything of interest. Mostly just ruined furniture and old moth eaten clothes. Figured. A little yellow house was where most of the Quincy settlers were staying, complete with a power armor rack and workbenches. Even the Mr. Handy had congregated close by. Which made his job even easier than the lack of dog. He’d been chased by a Mr. Handy’s scary spinning pizza cutters before. Not eager to repeat.

Across the street from the community house was a rather more well-kempt house-- the one with the withered geraniums that’d been so desperately maintained. He figured that the Mr. Handy’s old owner must’ve lived there, and the thing had kept up its’ cleaning with nothing better to do. He slipped into the house, avoiding the creaky door entirely. No need to open it more than it already hung on its’ old hinges. It opened to a kitchen and living room, a comfortable little space. Undisturbed, relatively, if the layer of dust coating everything was anything to go by. Shattered ceramic on the floor from mugs that had been sitting on the picturesque little dining room table, an empty fridge, an empty breadbox, a Grognak the Barbarian comic that had managed to barely survive with any of its’ pictures intact. All the comforts of home, but without the comfort.

Deacon took care not to properly touch anything so as to leave any space even the slightest bit free of dust. To someone paying attention, that’d be a deadly transgression of the whole ‘in and out like a shadow’ thing. He drifted soundlessly over the cracked linoleum floors down the hallway to the left. A laundry room. Nothing of interest. A bathroom. Nothing of interest. He heads to the last room on the right, peering in.

A nursery. The tips of his fingers went cold, lips turning down into a grim frown. The implications of somethings, well...they never got easier to stomach. The sorts of quiet pre-war horrors that most Wastelanders tried to avoid. He proceeded inside. Deacon never really was one for adhering to the untouchable sanctity of tragedy. People died all the time and the world kept turning anyways. This place was nearly as untouched as the rest of the house-- except for the tiniest of details.

The unmistakable lines of human fingers, an imprint of cleanliness where everything else was covered in dust. They were skinny-- a woman’s hands, no doubt, and the lines stretched around the crib’s circular rail entirely. She’d been gripping this crib for dear life. He stepped up to the crib’s side, placing the pads of his fingers to each of the spaces, placing himself about where he estimated the mysterious visitor would have stood. He glanced about. The ‘for dear life’ thing didn’t seem literal, at the very least, there weren’t any signs of struggle. No, this was a much more...internalized type of struggle, he’d decided.

“Now, if  _ I  _ were a recently-thawed housewife, where would I go?” The informant muttered to himself, withdrawing his hands and rocking back on his feet, moving back for the doorway. 

Only one room left. 

It’s a bedroom, though it’s more a sad excuse for what’s left of one. And what’s worse, the place is...well, obviously a good deal more destroyed than the rest of the house. The half-broken bedframe was shoved aside haphazardly, mattress folded over. He leaned down slightly to examine the frame closely, and found a few dust-free smudges where the woman had forced the bed aside to make passage through the bedroom. It’s easy to recognize the relative size of her hands.

Though she hadn’t acted with nearly the caution not to disturb anything too deeply like in the nursery. No, this was the crime scene of a woman on a warpath. His foot crunched down on broken glass as he shifted his weight, and he cursed himself inwardly for having not noticed, freezing up. No footsteps, nothing but the passive whispers of the autumn wind blowing against the house. Deacon relaxed, exhaling his held breath and turning his gaze upwards to the wooden display case that was held up against the wall-- the glass of it shattered. That was one mystery solved. A flag lay crumpled, hanging over the case, its’ sad little stars and stripes yellowed with age and one edge caught up on one of two peculiar little metal hooks. The things that held whatever was displayed in there, he assumed.

With more delicate steps to avoid making any noise over the shattered glass, Deacon proceeded further into the room, past the bed. A metal safe sat at the foot of the wall closet, open for all the world to see its’ contents. He knelt down, sifting through what contents were left. The bottom of the safe was lined with newspaper clippings, yellowed with age, but well-preserved, all things considered. The errant wife had made a mess of them in her rush. From the lack of dust lining the bottom of the safe, he guessed that they were likely lined all over the bottom of it. There was a hat, faded green and obviously military. A few wads of pre-war money bound in tape. And most tellingly of all, an empty ammo box, military-issued. He glanced about, tracing the floor. 

A single spent bullet-- the long style casing of a sniper rifle shot. He stood up, raising his hands as though he were holding a rifle-- and finding the stray bullet’s final resting place. A test shot fired straight into the wall. He sent a glance back over his shoulder to the display case. That was  _ another _ mystery solved. With a quiet huff, he knelt back down, carefully lifting the newspaper clippings free. Light reading for later, he decided.   
Deacon let himself out through the window, slipping into the shrubbery and slinking his way around back. It was a long walk back to ford the creek and avoid the bridge. And he had an inkling that the Sole Survivor was going to be making waves soon-- waves that he intended to ride upon, not be swept under by.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this one was fun to write. chutzpah is a really really good word and i really need more opportunity to use it imo


	5. arrival

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> widow has a strange introduction to diamond city. deacon sweats through his disguise.

Widow makes it her most presently pressing quest to find something to cover her face. She started with an old gas mask, but it sat so clunkily on her head and the eye holes were so smudged up that it made it difficult to aim. She managed to upgrade to a slightly better gasmask, but it wasn’t exactly perfect. Luckily, there’s no shortage of raiders on her path to Diamond City, and with a few spare parts, she rigged together a much more passable helmet that fully covers her head and lets her old jacket’s hood settle up over it quite easily. Content that her identity would be harder to place now, Widow moved on.

She couldn’t shake the feeling she was being watched. And she was loathe to ever think that she could just be paranoid-- no, it was that deep-seated anxious clutch around her gut that kept her alive. She rounded the next street corner and promptly dipped behind the first pile of rubble she saw, slinging her rifle off her back and propping it on the ground. She lowered her head, and waited, then, her gaze drifting across the tops of the nearest buildings. Usually where a sniper would be. Height is always preferable.

And she waits. A long time, but she’s used to it. And finally, there’s movement. A head raises from atop a building’s brick railing, and her finger twitches instinctively. There’s no gun with this person, she notices just soon enough. Her sights shift just to the left, and she pulls the trigger. The head drops down and out of sight promptly. Widow held her position a few moments more before exhaling a long-held breath and pushing up to her feet. She turned and headed back on route then, as though nothing had happened.

 

* * *

 

She _shot_ him. Admittedly, Deacon was a little spooked. More than that, his perfect ear and cheekbone were grazed and bleeding. Didn’t she know how much that sort of thing costed, he wondered facetiously. Of course she didn’t. Still, though, it wasn’t as though he hadn’t been around the block in a sniper fight or two. He just hadn’t exactly been gunning to snipe her first. He wiped the little bit of blood that had oozed out of the wounds away with a crooked smile despite himself.

The Switchboard was gone. Maybe this Vaultie was more up the Railroad’s alley than he had initially assumed-- and maybe she was what they needed to fatten the ranks a little. A distant, very quiet voice in his head chides him for how quickly he’s trying to move on from the massacre. Accuses him, really-- not without merit, of course. He asks back at it ‘what else am I supposed to do besides move on?’ It pipes down.

He’s still got time to beat the housewife-sniper to the entrance of Diamond City. That kind of reception isn’t something he wants to miss.

 

* * *

 

Everyone in the Commonwealth talks a _lot_ , Widow notes. Maybe she’s just groggy, but she’s having trouble keeping up. They’ve all got so much to say and they talk like there’s no time to say it.  She’s infinitely grateful to finally have a helmet covering her face so that the intrepid reporter arguing up a storm with the apparent Mayor of Diamond City can’t see just how boggled she looks. When the Mayor addresses her to ask what’s brought her to the City, she delays in response for perhaps a second longer than was wise.

“...I’m looking for a missing person.” She answered, with the too-deep voice that the helmet provided with the way her voice reverberated through its’ metal. She couldn’t call Shaun her son. She couldn’t say it was her son. She’d never felt like he was her’s-- not really. Not even when they cut him out of her and left the physical proof that he had been her’s as puckered pink skin on her abdomen. Shaun was Nate’s. And Nate was gone. The Mayor’s eyes widen and Piper’s expression drops in sympathy for a moment before tugging back into anger again as she turned to the Mayor with renewed vigor.

Widow appreciated Piper’s enthusiasm, at least, even if it was more a vendetta she’d already had. She crossed her arms, listening in with more...pointed attention now. Kidnappings were common, apparently. And she dropped a name-- The Institute. An old burn raised up in her gut. She inclined her head ever so slightly as the Mayor departed with a final, sanitized welcome to the city, to which she replied with ‘mmm’. Piper gave a frustrated, aimless toss of her arms.

“...It was Piper, yes?” Widow asked softly. The girl seemed to jerk out of her fuming thoughts and props her hands on her hips.

“Yeah, that’s me. Look, we...shouldn’t talk here. You never know who’s listening. But...meet me in my office later. I’ve got a story that I think you’ll be perfect for.” She smiled, giving a wink. Widow tenses slightly-- not used to being winked at. She eases up momentarily, just offering Piper a nod. The reporter turned on heel, tucking her hands into her pockets and stalking up into the city.

Widow sighed, looking around. The guard sitting at the gate’s controls-- Danny, she presumed, since Piper had been referring to him as such-- saw her head turn towards him and promptly cringed, looking away. She turned her head to look over the other guards, then. One kept leaning against the wall, smoking passively, and one in a pair of sunglasses pointedly looks away so as not to make awkward eye contact. Well, as much eye contact as two people both wearing something over their eyes could make.

At least the scary black outfit and helmet are having the intended effect. She drummed a finger on her upper arm thoughtfully. Something felt...off.

The one in sunglasses had an injured cheek and ear. Clean-- a bullet graze. She rocked forward, striding over to him with pointedly loud steps in her clunking military boots until she stood just in front of him. In the tall boots, she had perhaps an inch and a half of height on him, but it was enough to play as an advantage.

 

* * *

 

He’s so busted. Deacon lets half his actual feelings of dread slip onto his face as the vaultie approaches, playing it off more as just the fear of your average guardsman being faced with a tall ass woman in a black trenchcoat with a big rifle. He clears his throat, shifting from foot to foot and straightening his back.

“Can I, uh, help you, ma’am?” He decided on the spur of the moment to use the thickest Boston accent he could. They were in Boston after all. Technically.

“What happened to your cheek?” She asks, bluntly. He blinked, idly picking at the skin with a fingernail. He examined the bit of scab left under his nail incredulously.

“I dunno. I didn’t know anything happened to it. Shit, I must’ve tripped or something.”

_Goddamn it_ . That’s got to be one of the borderline worst lies he’s ever told. ‘I tripped’ is like baby’s first injury importance reduction lie. It’s the default that everyone goes for is that they tripped. He should’ve said he has a dog that scratched him or that even a Raider bullet grazed him, not that he _tripped_. Deacon briefly wondered why Desdemona even let him do this stuff sometimes.

“I see.” The woman replies, as blunt as she ever is. She doesn’t sound convinced, but she doesn’t sound...entirely unconvinced either? “Do you give tours? I am new. Obviously.”

“Not my purview, lady. Head in and look for ol’ Jimmy by the noodle place. That’s on his payroll, not mine. Tell him that,“ Think, Deacon, think, “Timmy sent you.”

“...Timmy and Jimmy.” She remarks with a quiet huff that may have been an actual chuckle. Deacon can’t help but wonder if smiling might’ve just made the woman’s face actually crack beneath that helmet, judging by how grim she seems to be with everyone else.

  
“Thank you. Good afternoon.”

The woman turned and just left then, as though she hadn’t just scared the living daylights out of him with some measure of intent. It was hard to tell whether or not she bought it, but for the sake of his peace of mind, he chose to believe she did for now. He called over his shoulder to Danny that he was going for a smoke break. He wanted out of the awful guard uniform-- he always ended up smelling like a foot when he wore it too long. Couldn’t exactly wander about leaving Railroad tapes everywhere when he looked like a guardsman walking the world’s most suspicious patrol route, after all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> little bit of a wait on this one! sorry about that <3 ty to everyone who's given it a read thus far. (psst im @wyrmforge on tumblr if you're looking to see my Blog Content and also more gushing about our resident sunglasses wearing egghead. or if u wanna shoot me a message >u>)

**Author's Note:**

> guess whos binging fallout 4 and totally head over heels for slimy grease boy!!! its me, predictably enough. so here's tart coming back atcha with another slimy grease boy fic we're making the rounds. forewarning that this is likely going to be relatively self indulgent as the primary point of interest for me is exploring the character interactions between deacon and my sole in particular, so if that's not your cup of tea, i totally get it! but i ask you to give me a chance while i get my feet all wet.
> 
> ty to kristicola for beta reading!


End file.
